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Ad Agency As Incubator? Young And Rubicam's Spark Plug Program Turns One

David Sable, Global CEO of Young & Rubicam and Creator of Spark Plug (photo courtesy of Young & Rubicam)

I spoke this week with David Sable, Global CEO of Young & Rubicam, in New York, about Y&R Spark Plug incubator program, his personal brainchild, launched a year ago in Spring 2012.

I remarked that it seemed an unlikely combination – a global agency and fledgling startups – but he gave me another perspective. Like every agency today, Y&R is needing to reinvent and re-innovate the ways to thrive in what Sable terms “the social aspects of immersive technology.” Data visualization, story telling, content creation (now he really has my attention)—as all of these ideas and interesting people and ideas have come through their doors, Y&R has found a way to give them a home.

While Y&R comprises 6,500 employees working from some 187 offices in 91 countries (including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris and Singapore), Y&R has never lost its entrepreneurial leanings, Sable tells me, referring to the agency as a “global boutique.”

For a company of 6,500, the agency’s New York headquarters are not as big as you’d think. The location provides 30 “seats” in an open arrangement—not even Sable maintains a private office (I love the way this CEO thinks). As innovative upstarts emerge, many of them just 1-2 employees big, the agency provides help to the fledgling companies they see as most potentially promising for their own clients by providing them with a place to work from and the connections they need to take hold.

A year into the program, Y&R is assisting 20 companies, 4-5 in the New York office and 1-2 each in the other primary locations through the world. I spoke to two of them – Hyperactivate and Interlude – this week. Y&R provides no funding and takes no equity positions in these firms, instead bringing them into client meetings and providing needed connections to see if the ideas take hold and the technologies are able to fly. When the time comes that funding is needed, Y&R’s parent company WPP, which also has presence in the Y&R offices and has the chance to see the companies in action, may take an equity position in the young ventures; and Y&R is also able to help make introductions and connections to other funding sources as well.

One of the companies, Interlude (headed by Israeli rock star Yoni Bloch, covered in AdWeek’s initial announcement a year ago of the Spark Plug program here), has received funding through via a joint venture Sable has a role in with WPP, which “makes things really interesting,” Sable says, as an opportunity to participate in a young company’s success while also having the strong incentive to ensure the fledgling venture succeeds. A second Spark Plug company is also currently preparing for funding, and Y&R, through WPP, will likely take an equity position in that venture as well.

Spark Plug company Hyperactivate is headed by co-founders Marc Fischman and Gilad Zirkel. They provide analytics and custom applications to give companies insights about their social media users, to tell companies in greater detail than has been possible before where their revenue opportunities are occurring, and which sales leads have resulted from which users, and which posts or tweets.

They also have the ability to create social media “mosaics” made up of the posts and tweets of thousands of individuals to create a dynamic billboard. (In a prior article, I showed one of Hyperactivate’s displays that appeared on the Today Show, used to unveil on live television the title of Dan Brown’s newest book.)

Fischman and Zirkel told me how they came to be a part of the Spark Plug program: “We’d been operating about a year and a half when we realized the opportunity and need to become part of an incubator program,” said Fischman. “An individual we work with, Jeff Pulver of Vonage, is connected to David Sable at Y&R and helped us connect. It’s been a wonderful experience – it’s truly helped us with the connections and the immersion we need to fully be ‘a part’ of the industry instead of being ‘apart’ as we’ve been making our way.”

Marc Fischman, Hyperactivate CEO (Photo courtesy of Young & Rubicam)

“Both of us are from Tel Aviv,” Zirkel added. “We have an entire technology team in Tel Aviv, part time and full time to help us accomplish any size of project—but we had a limited need for our own space in New York. The Spark Plug program has been an ideal answer.”

Y&R takes Hyperactivate into client meetings and helps to forge connections such as the recent partnership with Clear Channel to create and manage a digital display on one of the Times Square jumbotrons as a celebration of Y&R’s 90th birthday in May. The campaign reached a reported 6 million viewers.

“Without Y&R, an opportunity like the one we just accomplished with Clear Channel would have been years in the making.”

According to Fischman, the Hyperactivate partners own their own computers, but Y&R has provided everything else needed for them to operate transparently from within the agency’s facility.

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I had a chance to chat with him at the 90th Anniversary, even got a short bit on video, you can check it out here: http://socialmediaclub.org/blogs/from-the-clubhouse/young-rubicams-90th-anniversary-ceo-david-sables-advice-startups-video

Thanks, Miriam! I really enjoyed the interview. I’m going to look forward to this program in the future to see how it all comes out. I’ve never heard of an ad agency serving as an incubator for startups before, but I must say, the way this program is structured makes good sense. Thanks for your note! -Cheryl

This certainly does sound interesting and innovative. You’ll have to follow up in a few months and let us know how things pan out.

The term incubator is a good one. Those of us who are fortunate enough to get a “leg up” into a successful career should, if only by virtue of good karma, seek out those worth incubating…not a bad way to grow one’s business…